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New York, 7:53 PM
Tue Nov 10
74 posts in the last 24 hours
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10/08/09
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10/08/09
Grass is a former Nobel winner? Isn't he still a Nobel winner? Did he have to give the prize back?
10/08/09
Other people have commented on the problem with lumping together Hungarian, Francophone, Anglophone and Germanophone writers. They all come from vastly different languages, historical experiences and cultures, and designing them all as "European" is exclusively seeing them from an American perspective. Sure, it might be infuriating to see Roth, Oates or Oz ignored for "another European", but it doesn't look like that from here. No American writer has won the Nobel since 1993? Before Le Clezio's win, no Francophone writer had won it since 1986 (Gao Xingjiang, though a naturalised French citizen, doesn't write in French), and one might have had the impression that English-speaking and German speaking authors were recently privileged.
Finally, in the past 10 years, Gao Xingjiang (French citizen, but Chinese writer, VS Naipaul (British, to be sure, but has quite a wider perspective), Orhan Pamuk (not starting the "is Turkey in Europe?" debate here) and JM Coetzee (South African) have won the prize. One might add Le Clezio, partly raised in Mauritius and Nigeria. Do these writers count for nothing? How is that a Eurocentric perspective?
10/08/09
As if literature is some kind of Olympic track-and-field contest with clear winners & losers.
And ironically, downplaying the merits of "obscure European authors" betrays exactly the kind of cultural centrism that the Nobel committee CANNOT be accused of.
10/08/09
I know. One of the merits of literary prizes (apart from the recompense to the author, which is always nice for said author) is that sometimes, they make you discover a writer you'd never heard of before, or had heard about but never thought of reading. So my reaction to Mueller's win isn't "never heard of her" (which is the case, and is my problem, not a reflection of her talent or lack thereof), but "Oh, I'll check her books".
I rreally regret Egdahl's comments, because they seemed to justify certain feelings of "It's not faaair" to which I feel like saying: "Oh, as a French speaker, I was beginning to wonder whether the prize only went to English-speaking and German-speaking writers, until Le Clezio won". No, I wasn't, actually, and anyone could have brought up Orhan Pamuk and Gao Xingjiang. But if you're exclusively focused on the fact that writers from certain countries have been ignored for a while, you risk forgetting it's about the writer, not his country of origin. Egdahl's comments only gave arguments to people who seem to only see it in terms of geography. I know that Roth is a fantastic writer, but I would have hated for such a great writer as Imre Kertesz not to get the Nobel because Hungary is in Europe and the committee should be careful not to give an impression of favouritism.
That said, I'm glad that a WOMAN got it, and in the next years, I'd love to see Margaret Atwood, Murakami and Antonio Lobo Antunes (Ooops, European! That might turn out to be a handicap in the future if this controversy is taken seriously. Too bad, Antunes. I'm kidding, but I'd hate it to get to that.) win the Nobel.
10/08/09
NPR announced this earlier, and emphasized how the committee favors Europeans.
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And this from a committee that says Americans are too insular and isolated:
"The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining,’ Horace Engdahl publicly said in an interview with the Associated Press.
10/08/09
I know, that's not completely true, but the politicization of the Nobel Prize for Literature infuriates me.
10/08/09
It's not like I'm going OH NOES THEY DIDN'T PICK AN AMERICAN, but some of my favorite authors - Munro, who you mentioned, and Ha Jin, who writes spectacularly about life in Communist China - are persistently ignored. It's irritating; they're ignoring that there's a great literary world outside Europe.
10/08/09
But then again, the absolute LAST person the Europeans will give the Nobel to is an Israeli.
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Not to mention - SO DOES THE REST OF THE WORLD.
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And who the fuck said anything about being nudists or cheating on spouses or whatever?
Read what the conversation is actually ABOUT before you start going off on tangents.
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I promise you, no one in Europe is saying "Yay, a european won" because we don't think like that. The only time I've identified myself as "european" was when I talked to americans who didn't seem to understand that Europe consists of many different and diverse countries. If anything, there is a huge gap between former communist states and non-communist states, but that's a whole other Oprah
10/08/09
What I do know is that the Schwaben (ie the native Romanians of German ethnicity) are practically extinct as an ethnic group--they pretty much all immigrated to Western Europe during the Communist regime. They left behind their beautiful villages and churches and traditions, and their dialect is probably by now a dead language. In that context, I can totally see why the Nobel Committee would recognize a writer that has preserved her dying community's image in writing.
The Nobel Prizes for Literature have always been intensely politicized, and it's a bit silly to think that they represent some "Europeans" vs. "The rest of the world" contest. In the last seven six years alone, the laureates were writers from Mauritius, South Africa, Iran, and Turkey. All countries where intense political/cultural battles are being waged.
10/08/09
Also, considering the recent history of Romania, I'm quite sure that Herta Mueller has a lot to say about what she's witnessed in her life.
And I'm with whoever said that you shouldn't lump all European countries together. Cultural FAIL indeed.
10/08/09
Still, Murakami is deserving.
10/08/09
I did not lump all European countries together. I was talking about the Nobel Committee, and specifically this quote:
"The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining,’ Horace Engdahl publicly said in an interview with the Associated Press.
10/08/09
your neighbour to the north.
By the way...
1) have you read her book?
2) have you ever been to a former east block country? and not to a budapest or a prague--but a szob or a Eger (Better now that in the 90's but worse in a lot of ways.... grinding POVERTY). I suspect she has something more to say about life than complaining about getting a cold cup of Starbucks.
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1) No.
2) Yes. My family comes from two such countries.
10/08/09
[www.chicagotribune.com]
STOCKHOLM - -- Americans Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth join Israel's Amos Oz in the buzz surrounding the Nobel Prize in literature, especially after the most prominent judge said U.S. writers are worthy of the award, which will be announced Thursday.
Last year, outgoing permanent secretary Horace Engdahl said the U.S. was too insular to challenge Europe in the literary world.
His successor, Peter Englund, said this week "there are authors that really deserve and could get the Nobel Prize and that goes for the United States and the Americas, as well."
10/08/09
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I think that in writing and speech, we use "Europeans" and "Americans" broadly for the sake of convenience, and I simply don't detect any more sinister implications in @Becky Sharper's post.
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But we are, Blanche. We are.
10/08/09
Also, did you know that the US got 12 Nobel Prizes in Literature (11.88 % of all Nobel Prize winners), which makes them the second most celebrated country by the Nobel Commitee in Literature? Interesting fact, at least I think so.
I suppose, as a European, that I should apologize on Dr. Engdhal's behalf for his hurtful words, but I lived in the US for almost three years, and you are insular and isolated. It's not all your fault, some of it is due to geography, but really, anybody who watches the news in the US is forced to admit that you guys have no idea of what's going on abroad.
Also if you go the an American bookstore, the choices in foreign literature are much more restricted than in, say, a French bookstore. I've watched 2 plus years of interviews on the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, and I've only seen one interview with a with someone who hadn't written his book in English. If someone in the Nobel Committee says that the American publishing industry doesn't introduce enough translations on the market, don't you think it's worth looking into before getting all butthurt?
Finally, that kind of ignorance is restraining. It's ignorance of other cultures that led the US in the quagmire of Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance. I'm not saying that other countries are perfect in that regard - plenty of ignorance and prejudice to go around - but the US does take the cake sometimes.
10/08/09
As far as the label "Americans," you make a good point. However, I still think that there's bound to be inaccuracy when you address 300 million people as a homogenous group.
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Note to all North Americans: when you think of Europe, please remember that it's not all Paris and London. There is a whole big struggling, invisible part of the continent that would like to be a part of Europe but is still only that way geographically.
10/08/09
Of course, I think we both agree on that. But since the main discussion is about the nationalities of the winners, "American" here is more pertinent than "European", which doesn't even give the slightest indication of the probable language of the writer. I say probable because a citizen of one country doesn't necessarily write in the language of said country, and because I tend to notice the language of the authors who won the Nobel more than their nationality, and there are several English (Pinter, Naipaul, Lessing) and German (Grass, Jelinek and now Mueller) speakers.
10/08/09
Things were getting heated and I mostly just wanted to keep the discussion civil and defend someone's intent (which I felt was innocent), even though I totally saw the merit in the opposing argument.
10/08/09
Yes, Amos Oz and Murakami are outside of Europe. I'd just like to point out that in the last 10 years, at least 4 (and maybe 5) writers could only be described as Eurocentric in bad faith: Chinese-born Gao Xingjiang, Trinidad-born (and of Indian descent) VS Naipaul, Turkish Orhan Pamuk and South-African JM Coetzee. The fifth, which some people might argue, is French-Maurician JMG Le Clezio, from a French family installed in Mauritius since generations, and raised partly in Mauritius and Nigeria, and who really doesn't write about France at all.
The only way to consider them Eurocentric is to only consider their country of residence in the case of Xingjiang and VS Naipaul (neither Coetzee, Le Clezio or Pamuk live in Europe -- unless you consider that Turkey is strictly a European country. (not touching that debate with a bargepole)
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Horace Engdahl, the previous secretary, said in 2008 "Europe still is the center of the literary world" and the quality of U.S. writing was dragged down because authors were "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture.
So.
10/08/09
For example, one the biggest pan-European bestsellers last year, "The Kindly Ones" (Les Beinveillantes, in original) is a 1,000-page novel about a German WWII officer, written in FRENCH, by an AMERICAN born-, raised-and-educated author, Jonathan Littell.
Very controversial, too, btw. I highly recommend it.
10/08/09
...Who lives in Barcelona, Spain. Wait, that's in Europe. My bad.
Seriously, "Les Bienveillantes" really, really disturbed me. Fantastic book, but I'm not sure I'd be able to re-read it.
10/08/09
I wasn't being disparaging towards Americans. As someone who's lived in both Europe and the US, I was making what seems to me an educated critique. Just because you're not screaming "USA number one!" all the time doesn't mean you're a knee-jerk anti-American.
The Daily Show and the Colbert Report are venues in which the American publishing industry promote their products. Care to share with us how that makes them inappropriate measures for my argument? Or is that crude and anti--American?
10/08/09
As to the main debate... I have spent a lot of my life in Canadian, American, and German bookstores. Canada has maybe a bit more in the way of literary translation because of Quebec, but in America, you're hard pressed to find translations of post-1950 writing from the rest of the world. In Germany, somewhere between 30-40% of new books are translations. When I'm there, I see new translations of contemporary authors I've never heard of, and not just from West European languages. There are translations out of Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, various other East European languages, Turkish and so on. They don't have translations from *every single* language, naturally, but the kinds of authors a German is exposed to just by browsing the shelves in a bookstore is beyond compare to anything in N. America. It's the kind of thing you don't even notice about the book market here until you see that it can be done differently.
So, I'm sorry to have to say this, but even when Europeans *are* Eurocentric, that means something quite different than you might think. The literary world *in Europe* already contains much more writing from various languages than anything Americans can imagine.
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On the flip side, your argument seems to suggest that we have so few translations here in North America, or in the U.S., because there's so much more literature in English to choose from, and so we read widely and internationally, but in English. But how much Australian or Canadian literature is there on the bookshelves in the US? In Germany, I see quite a lot of Canadian novels translated into German (they write: "aus dem kanadischen Englisch" under the title, so you know what country it's coming from) and prominently displayed in bookstores.
I also haven't found Americans (and I should say: American grad students in English, so you know what my sample group is) to be particularly knowledgeable about Canadian writers. But they should be, right? Or are Canada's 30 million people and position directly to the north not enough to warrant attention?
Frankly, I think the truth lies more here: the American reading public, as a whole, has a limited interest in non-American literature.
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I've also worked for an agent and seen first and how skeevy British publishers are about accepting amazing novels that were written in foreign languages. Some get through, but many don't.
Hurrah for the Pete Ayrtons of this world.
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Way to equate the Nobel Commitee with a bunch of bigoted thugs, by the way.
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Seriously. The implication here is that Amos Oz doesn't get the Nobel because of antisemitism, right? I wonder what they make of the wonderful Imre Kertesz, the 2002 Nobel Prize winner, Hungarian Jewish, Holocaust survivor, and who largely writes about his experience? Oh wait, he's European, never mind.
10/08/09
06/04/09
Wow.
06/04/09
Casting: Cameron Diaz, per the previous posts, Obvs.
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05/29/09
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With the brains he'll be eating
All the humans be depleating
I'll avoid him just the same
05/29/09